


the supplication of a dead man's hand

by seraf



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Coercion, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Grooming, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Inner Dialogue, Inspired by Poetry, Introspection, Murder, Pre-Canon, Survivor Guilt, Victim Blaming, idealizing abusers, just trying to be careful with the tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-17 01:29:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21046061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraf/pseuds/seraf
Summary: korekiyo shinguji is a hollow man.remember us - if at all - not as lost violent souls, but onlyas the hollow men. the stuffed men.( character study/backstory for korekiyo. warnings as applicable. )





	the supplication of a dead man's hand

**Author's Note:**

> warnings obviously applicable to kiyo's story, especially since this is largely from his pov, and he tends to idealize his sister. while he speaks about her in a romantic/glorifying light, i would like to be very clear that what she does is emotional/psychological abuse, and sexual coercion/assault, even if kiyo is groomed into not seeing it in that light.

korekiyo shinguji is a hollow man.

voice a soft and educated rasp, he knows how to fill the air with stories, draws stories and connections together like weaving thread on a loom. ( the theft of fire - prometheus, maui, coyote, trickster figures bringing fire from those on high to those in the cold, in the dark, with numb and clumsy fingers, terrified of the shadows of their base dwellings. the great flood - noah and his gofer ark, the country of anahuac, inhabited by giants, the story of utnapishtim in the epic of gilgamesh. parallels in narratives, laid out like string drawn taut. )

his gestures are thin, without motion, his voice reedy when he is excited. though he is tall, it seems always as though he’s trying to take up as little space as possible - his skin clings to his bones as though it means to give a tearful apology for the inconvenience of the resources it uses. his arms always cling to his chest, his hips, his shoulders, as though he has nothing else to lean against.

not that final meeting in the twilight kingdom -

korekiyo shinguji knows death far more than he should.

when he was nine, his sister learned that she was a dead woman in the making, a corpse held in a state of animation by medical technology and the falling of sand through an hourglass - alive, by technicality, for now. doctors in white coats with eyes too hardened to really be sympathetic shook their heads, rested clinical hands on her shoulders as they told her; _you will never leave here again. _

nothing more than the past tense of a corpse, sitting in a hospital bed. there was a funeral held that day, a funeral for the life she would never get to lead. to the school days she would never attend or skip, the friends she would never make, the life of a young adult she would never get to lead. her childhood had been battered by disease, and her adolescence taken from her entirely.

something else died that day.

something like innocence, something like another childhood. his sister learned that the thin and sterile hospital sheets would be her shroud, and late that night, she pulled him under them. he was nine, then, and she seventeen, and she was making do with what she had.

he coughed up the ghost of his childhood the next day, and it tasted like iron and shame he didn’t completely understand just yet.

he’s fourteen when she dies.

when he was ten years old, she signed a piece of paper. as an anthropologist, he knows it was much more complex than that - there was a whirlwind of court dates that she had to attend remotely and social workers asking him about their parents, answers that sat in his mouth like sour milk and fell out curdled - but that was how he always thought about it. she was his legal guardian then, and being ten years old, he thought of it as a transference of ownership.

in some ways, he still thinks that schema is fitting.

he’s fourteen when she dies, and because she is his legal guardian, and because they’ve cut all ties with the rest of their family, he is all she has left. they have always been all there is for each other; two empty vessels tied together, leaning for support against the wind, but now, he is all she has in a legal sense of the word.

the machines are all that keep her heart beating, her brain activity drawing to a lull, and the question falls to him. her life in his hands, as he has to make the decision when to turn off her life support.

he watches vigil over her for two weeks, until - looking at them, you couldn’t distinguish which was the one nanometers from death. his breath is shallow, his hair greasy from days without showering, deep furrows dug out under his eyes by a farmer with an unsteady plow. he would give anything for life to enter her body again. he spends sleepless night after restless day and again praying for whatever higher power there is for them to drain the vitality from his body and give it to hers.

perhaps they are nothing more than stories, in the end.

two days later, he kills her.

( he doesn’t, not really, but it always feels like that. he is responsible, after all, and what is it when you are responsible for someone else’s death if not murder? there was nothing that could be done, but maybe if he had been different, had been stronger, hadn’t taken so much of her time, there would have been life enough in her body to sail her to a cure. )

his next brush with death is barely two days later, when he calmly searches down every bottle of her medication in their shared hospital room and tries to fill the empty vessel of his body with something other than grief.

is it like this, in death’s other kingdom, waking alone -

he wakes up, alone.

he keeps the bandages wrapped around his arms when he leaves the hospital. somehow, he feels as though they fit him.

( there is some concern, of course, when he leaves, as there is whenever a fourteen year old with _extreme suicidal ideation _written on clinical clipboards and behind the eyes of anyone who looks at him, disappears. but in the end, he and sister had been two bundles of dry wheat, leaned on each other, the only things keeping each other upright. when she is removed, it is only natural that he fall. they stop bothering to look for him after a month. )

in this last of meeting places, we grope together, and avoid speech, gathered on this beach of this tumid river.

in later anthropological papers, in theses to come ( penned for so long under _xxx shinguji, _under his sister’s name, because he is a half-dead fifteen year old, and it is far easier to don her confidence, her lipstick, her haughty stare, and be taken seriously, than present the brittle shell of himself for judgement. ) he never reveals the name or the location of the village where he first sees her again. he feels as though that would be giving away something sacred.

as an anthropologist, he is careful to try not to have faith in any particular higher power, to avoid bias. but this feels like something sacred, nonetheless.

( he’s unsure what it was that brought him close to death. asphyxiation, perhaps, from the ropes around his chest and throat, or blood loss, from the trenches dug into his skin again and again with a whip. but the broken ribs he suffers afterwards are proof that he waltzed along the razor wire of life with the spectre of the grave as he met his sister once again. she holds his face, and they cry out together, for how long it has been since they saw each other. )

she asks too much of him.

she has never asked too much of him; he has demanded too much from her.

she has given him everything, and he was responsible for her death - does he not owe her this? it was in part because she had to be responsible for raising him that she had no friends, after all, and he was the cause of the ceasing of her pulse, so why would he hesitate to end others’? does he not love her, after all? is her life worth less than that of a stranger’s?

love is sacrifice. the two are synonymous, he has always been told.

human sacrifice is thematic in several prehistoric worldly religions; commonly viewed in more ‘civilized’ cultures as a sign of barbarism. as if they don’t practice it themselves; as though the thought that one person or one group of people can be killed to appease god or nature or a vague sense of socioeconomics.

korekiyo shinguji is fifteen when he kills someone for the first time, and he is thinking about none of that at the moment.

it doesn’t feel glorious, it doesn’t feel liberating or exhilarating or like some kind of revelation, some kind of realization.

his hands are covered with blood, and he crumples to the ground the moment he leaves the room with her body in it, vomits up everything he has in him and dry retches once he has nothing left to give, both hands gripping the knife until his blood is mixed with hers, the edge of the blade pressing into his palm.

there was a life in the world, and now there isn’t.

he killed someone. he killed someone. he is fifteen years old, and he loves his sister, and she asked him to, and he _killed _someone.

he lies there, in the dirt and in his own vomit, shaking like a building with broken foundations, and prays that someone finds him. prays that someone takes vengeance, and ends him here and now.

it’s _her _hands that push him upright, that wash their face and hands clean, that hide the evidence. that chastize him later, for his weakness.

it never gets easier. he just learns to be able to make it to a bathroom before he retches.

between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.

he doesn’t mean to kill anyone, when the killing game begins. he really doesn’t. he simply wants to observe.

there is a sour taste in his mouth, and he can see something flitting behind his eyes like the shades of the underworld. he laughs to her about it afterwards, in their room, a little bit wry. _it is as the wood of the eumenides none but the dying may enter; and oedipus is about to die. _

_mary shelley, really? _she asks him, her mouth twisting, and he simply shrugs.

he knows it like he has known seldom few things before; in the same way that he knows what it would feel like to have his sister’s hands wrapped around his throat; in the same way that he knows how it would burn to touch a branding iron despite never having one pressed to his flesh. experience through ancestral memory.

he knows he will die here.

he thinks that is alright.

between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, falls the shadow.

they agree not to kill anyone. they agree to get out of here together. kaede promises she will be his sister’s friend, once they do.

human words are the foundation of all he studies. they are bedrock, and they are also as fragile as hot glass, and korekiyo shinguji, here, witnesses them being both. witnesses rantaro’s skull bashed open against the carpet; realizes the angle is all too wrong for him to have been struck overhead by a falling object. catches the eyes of ryoma; realizes they know the same thing. knows both of them will not speak of it; to do so would be to admit to how they know. ryoma may be open about his actions, but they are distasteful in the eyes of others.

he and ryoma spend some time together, after that. they never talk about their similarities. there is a kind of solidarity there nonetheless. in that they both lost the women they loved; that they both killed for her death, in that they have both wanted to end their own lives.

and then ryoma is nothing more than scattered bones, and kirumi, beautiful kirumi, is to blame, with the most ardent will to live korekiyo has ever seen. it takes his breath away, how it burns through her - a fierce, beautiful, completely _futile _desire to survive.

the rope breaks, and it is like a falling angel. suspended for a moment in that eternal, beautiful, loss of grace, torn to shreds by her own inability to give in.

he will never say as much, but he looks away before she hits the ground.

he would prefer to imagine her in that moment of falling, that loss of grace, forever.

between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, falls the shadow.

shuichi talks to him like no one ever has. listens to his words as though he is interested; not even just in the anthropology itself, but in the fact that korekiyo is the one saying them, in the fact that it is his interest. korekiyo does not know how to handle his attention, so pretends that the interest in shuichi’s eyes are for the stories he spins out before him, for the tangents about seances he goes off on. pretends that shuichi is returning because he is an eager student.

he looks at him as though korekiyo is someone worth trusting, someone worth befriending, and korekiyo does not know how to feel about that, about the way it rubs him raw.

so he simply does not.

he had been waiting for a cult to form, honestly - this situation is perfect for it. the academy is a warm, damp, dark room, and angie yonaga is simply the bacteria to leap to the opportunity.

her words are golden, and there is something almost admirable about how easily she is able to sway others to her.

he thinks had she met him when he was younger and desperate and in need of someone to show him what to do, she might have swayed him as well. he cannot even blame his classmates for being caught up in the gale force winds of her strength of will. they are simply young and desperate and in need of someone to show them what to do, here and now.

they will learn.

he did, after all. it will be a painful lesson, and he is . . . interested in watching it, in them.

he didn’t want to kill anyone here.

if he is completely honest - he even thinks of some of them with a fondness he is hesitant to admit, in a way that is completely unscientific. kokichi ouma, abrasive and annoying, but a trickster figure made in the flesh, with a smile that hid too much and thin fingers built by design for reaching places they should not. tenko chabashira, almost painfully honest in who she is, a staunch defender of women, and so very, very brave. shuichi saihara, his first friend.

but she asks him to.

it isn’t his own desire that pushes him, it isn’t his will that settles, decides that angie yonaga or himiko yumeno or tenko chabashira must die. but it is his mind that looks at the unsteady floorboards in the empty room and thinks of the simple mechanics of a lever, thinks of the seance he has always wanted to see, and it is his hand that methodically saws through them.

it is his hand that covers angie yonaga’s brow with tape, and his hand that plunges the sword into her chest.

he wonders if her god had a cruel sense of humor. she had told him, voice bright, that she was simply here to take a candle. there were candles in the other two empty rooms, in the warehouse, in kirumi’s lab. but she walked into him. walked into her death. he wonders if that, too, was her god’s will.

he is fascinated, watching tenko’s face upon the discovery of angie’s body. for a moment, there is relief, followed quickly by guilt.

he can use her guilt. can use her courage.

he hopes she makes his sister a good friend. he hopes she and angie settle the score between them. his sister was always a good intermediary, after all. perhaps she can help.

for thine is - life is - for thine is the -

they hate him, he thinks. they are disgusted in him.

( korekiyo shinguji is despicable, but he is nothing more than a hollow man. he is a shell, a vessel emptied of whatever potential he might have been, the inherent kindness and desire to help others he had as a child twisted by someone angry at what the world had given her, until he stands there, at their judgement, smiling softly behind his mask at their disgust. he knows he deserves it. )

( he is their friend, nonetheless. perhaps, one day, they will forgive him, as he watches over them. )

he always knew he would die here.

the details of how are somethiing that he tries to put out of his mind as best as possible. the memory of his own flesh cooking, the metal of his mask branding a line across his face, the layers of fat in his skin breaking down, the few seconds when his head went under and his brain boiled in his skull - they don’t matter. it is not important.

he is with her again. finally, peace floods his body.

perhaps, for once, he did not fail.

or, and this seems just as radical a thought, perhaps now, his failures do not even matter.

he can rest.

she is smiling at him, so she must be proud of him, which means his failures are forgivable, and he can _rest. _

but -

she is reaching for something. and monokuma is there, again, dressed as a shinto priest. he barely has the time to think about the irony of something that mired in despair in a mockery of religion, because monokuma and his sister are rending their own judgement.

korekiyo shinguji is reduced to dust, and he cannot even scream.

_this is the way the world ends._

_this is the way the world ends._

_this is the way the world ends._

_not with a bang but with a whimper. _


End file.
